More on the Subject of Thinking Critically About Records
If you want to believe the press releases, the hype, the liner notes, the reviews (which are rarely more than the worst kind of malpractice in our opinion) and all the rest of it, that’s your business.
Good luck with that approach; you’re going to need it. When you reach the dead end that surely awaits you, come see us. After 35 years in the record business there is a good chance we will still be around.
Our approach, on the other hand, revolves around cleaning and playing as many records as we can get our hands on, and then judging them on their merits and nothing but their merits, calling them as we see them as best we can, without fear or favor.
Our judgments may turn out to be wrong. Tomorrow we may find a better sounding pressing than the one we sell you today. It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.
We don’t know it all and we’ve never pretended that we did. All knowledge is provisional. We may not be the smartest guys in the room, but we’re sure as hell smart enough to know that much.
If somehow we did know it all, there would not be a hundred entries in our Live and Learn section.
We regularly learn from our mistakes and we hope you do too.
But we learn things from the records we play not by reading about them, but by playing them. Our experiments, conducted using the shootout process we’ve painstakingly developed and refined over the course of the last twenty years, produces all the data we need: the winners, the losers, and the ranking for all the records in-between.
We’ve learned to ignore everything but the sound of the records we’ve actually played on our reference system.
What, of value, could anyone possibly tell us about a record that we’ve heard for ourselves? The question answers itself.
This approach allows us to have a unique, and, to our way of thinking, uniquely valuable service to offer the discriminating audiophile. When you’re tired of wasting your time and money on the ubiquitous mediocrities that populate the major audiophile dealers’ sites and take up far too much space in your local record store, let us show you just how much more real handpicked-top-quality-recordings can do for your musical enjoyment.